


these sins i've committed, i'll take to my grave

by gaygentdanvers



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Mentions of Blood, Post-Reign, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-03-21 01:24:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13730157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gaygentdanvers/pseuds/gaygentdanvers
Summary: Somewhere in the back of her mind, she can hear a voice saying, “it wasn’t you,” as if that absolves her of the sins Reign committed with her body — of the fear she’s struck into the city, of the people she’s hurt, of the lives she’s stolen. Saying, “it wasn’t you,” as if that cleanses her of the guilt and lifts the blood from her hands.It doesn’t.





	these sins i've committed, i'll take to my grave

**Author's Note:**

> Have some good ol' post-Reign angst because I can't stop thinking about how Sam will feel — if the CW, hopefully for some reason, keeps her alive — after learning about all that she's done :))))
> 
> The graphic depictions of violence warning is more of a (slightly) graphic description of blood warning.

but the blood on my hands scares me to death.  
  
— _i'll be good,_  jaymes young.

 

Before she got pregnant with Ruby, Sam had run track in high school.  
  
  
Despite her long legs, she hadn’t been the star of the team, as everyone always assumes when she tells them. But she did long-distance relays and in the winter when it was too cold to go outside, she’d wait until the locker rooms emptied out and then run laps around the gym, because it helped things make sense. She would close her eyes and pretend that her stress was melting away with each lap, running until her lungs burned and her body ached and her muscles screamed in protest the harder she pushed herself.  
  
  
She’d run until she felt free, like nothing could touch her as long as she was fast enough.  
  
  
She kind of wishes she was back in high school now, because standing in front of the sink with her hands thrust under the water, she feels the exact opposite. This isn’t freedom — this is pure, unyielding terror, the kind that comes without warning and doesn’t remit for anyone. The kind that could quite possibly crush her, she thinks, or maybe swim through her veins with the intention of burning her from the inside out. Sam wonders if this is how the mind breaks, fragments of herself floating away. She wonders if she’s already broken.  
  
  
Her hands shake under the steady stream of water spurting from the faucet.  
  
  
She knows it’s not really there.  
  
  
It’s  _not_ , she  _knows_ this. There’s nothing there, nothing on her hands but tan skin stretched over thin bones and foamy white bubbles as she scrubs and scrubs and  _scrubs—_  
  
  
But she can  _feel_ it — coating her palms, dripping from the tips of her fingers, clumping underneath her nails — and it won’t wash away with the soap and water like it’s supposed to, even as Sam digs the cloth viciously into her skin to rub away what's not there.

 

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she can hear a voice saying, “it wasn’t you,” as if that absolves her of the sins Reign committed with her body — of the fear she’s struck into the city, of the people she’s hurt, of the lives she’s stolen. Saying, “it wasn’t you,” as if that cleanses her of the guilt and lifts the blood from her hands.  
  
  
It doesn’t.  
  
  
She still sees it in the paper sometimes, or on the news, in the few seconds it takes Alex to scramble for the TV remote. She still sees it in the destruction that National City has yet to recover from. She still sees it each time she looks in the mirror, catching the brief flash of red in her eyes until it flickers out a second later as though it were never there at all. The remnants of her past will never fully leave her, she knows — she was  _created_ for this, after all, born from Rao’s fire as a weapon of destruction, and no amount of mind wiping from J’onn can strip her of her true origin.  
  
  
Reign might be gone but it's  _her_  hands that are stained red, and so she scrubs and scrubs and scrubs some more, because how is she supposed to live with herself if the jarring reminder of her crimes is still painted on her skin?  
  
  
“Sam.”  
  
  
The sudden voice jerks her out of her trance like a splash of cold water. Even with super-hearing, she'd been so distracted that she hadn’t heard the bathroom door open, hadn’t noticed Alex standing in the doorway, and she grips at the washcloth with trembling, soapy fingers as the voice pierces through the silence. It’s firm and serious, but Sam can still hear the underlying tones of concern — of  _love_ — and it makes her want to cry, because doesn’t she know?  
  
  
Doesn’t she know that the blood won’t come off?  
  
  
“Sam,” Alex repeats, firmer than the last time. But Sam’s scrubbing doesn’t cease, and water rushing from the tap is scalding but she can’t feel the burn, though part of her desperately wishes she could because at least then she wouldn’t have to feel the blood _,_ red and sticky and unbelievably  _warm_.  
  
  
“Can I touch you?”  
  
  
At Sam’s feeble nod, she feels Alex’s body press against her back as the agent reaches around her, covering the hand that’s gripping the washcloth as though her life depends on it. Pale fingers curl around hers, trying to stop her movements. Vaguely, she can hear Alex speaking in her ear. “It’s not there,” she’s saying. “Look, see? It’s not there.”  
  
  
And yes, Sam does see, she  _knows_ that, but she takes the cloth and the soap and she scrubs because she can still fucking  _feel it—_  
  
  
“Sam, you’re scaring Ruby. You  _have_ to stop.”  
  
  
She falters. Her hands slow. Her grip loosens on the cloth.  
  
  
_Ruby_. Ruby, who’s supposed to still be innocent and good and who doesn’t deserve any of this, who had been so excited to find out Sam had powers and who was so confident in the fact that her mom would always come to save her. Because she had vowed, back before Ruby could even open her eyes yet, that she would do anything in her power to protect her. At sixteen years old, Sam already knew her worst fear was not being able to keep her safe, and she’s pretty sure that's the only rational fear she’s ever had.  
  
  
Then Reign had taken over, crushing her vows to dust in her merciless fist, because it turns out she was never meant to be the hero in this story.  
  
  
A foreign, broken sound spills out of her mouth, shoulders shaking violently as she leans forward, bracing herself against the sink. Icy tendrils spread throughout her body and bury themselves deep in her bones as she gasps for air that won’t come, lungs burning as contrition rises in her chest, a feeling that’s become a permanent occupant in her life. She sees Ruby in her head and she's screaming — screaming for Sam to come back, screaming for her to stop. Screaming in agony, in pain that Reign had caused, screaming in such raw grief that Sam feels her legs start to give out. She feels like she’s falling apart, shredded to ribbons.  
  
  
She knows, with abject certainty, that the sound will haunt her forever.  
  
  
“Hey,” Alex calls out to her, voice sounding far away to Sam’s ears. “Hey, Sam, you need to breathe, babe.”  
  
  
“Ruby,” Sam chokes out, fear bubbling up in her chest. “Where’s Ruby?”  
  
  
Alex is still pressed against her back. Sam can feel herself shaking all over, unable to stop. “Ruby is okay,” Alex assures her calmly. “She's back in her room. She's safe. Do you want me to get her?”  
  
  
She wants to nod. Wants to say yes. Wants to listen to every cell in her body that’s screaming  _please, I need to see her, I need to make sure she’s okay._ Wants nothing more than to give into the ache to hold her in her arms. But she knows she can't, not yet, so she finds herself shaking her head despite the overwhelming urge to do just the opposite. “No… No, she can’t see me like this.”  _She needs to be protected from it._  
  
  
“That’s okay,” Alex says, without an ounce of judgement.  
  
  
And that’s the thing about Alex that Sam can never fully wrap her head around — even after everything, the agent has never once been cold or callous to her; she's been just the opposite, caring and supportive and everything Sam hadn’t once let herself hope for after Reign. It had taken her months just to look Kara in the eye again after realizing what she’d done, and despite being cleared by J’onn after only a few weeks, she’d insisted on staying locked in the DEO for longer. Alex had always been the first to visit her in her cell and the last to leave, occasionally bringing Ruby along when Lena couldn’t, and somehow, their relationship had grown stronger over the first few weeks of her confinement.  
  
  
“I’m sorry,” she says, just barely above a whisper.  
  
  
“You have nothing to apologize for.”  
  
  
Sam only nods in response, because while it’s true that this isn’t the first time she’s done something like this for the sake of ridding herself of Reign — nor is it the first time Alex has bore witness to more or less the whole array of it — it still fills her to the brim with shame every time. Part of her almost feels silly for being so fucked up, so guilt-ridden, because she knows that Alex’s list of casualties is far longer and far worse than hers, but that’s because it’s her  _job_.  
  
  
Sam? Sam was nothing but an unwilling vessel.  
  
  
“It’s okay,” falls from Alex’s lips, feathery soft and gentler than she’s ever heard her speak to anyone, with the exception of Kara. “We’ll get through this together, remember?”  
  
  
Her hand flexes under Alex’s, and she can’t help but hone in on the soft sound of her lover’s heart. The familiar beat helps calm her, if only for a few moments before the panic grips her again like water seeping into her lungs, because she’s not  _done_.  
  
  
She shakes her head. “No, I- I need to finish-”  
  
  
“Let me do it.”  
  
  
The offer catches her off-guard. Her eyes meet Alex’s in the mirror, and the agent’s expression is serious. “Please?” she asks, bordering on the kind of desperate that Sam’s never seen from her before. “Let me do it.”  
  
  
A hand comes up to cup her cheek. She stares straight ahead, willing herself not to glance down to avoid the blood that is-but-isn’t-really there, and focuses once more on the thrum of Alex’s heart so her mind doesn’t replay the sound of Ruby’s anguished cries instead.  
  
  
_Bum, bum, bum._  A steady rhythm, beating just a tad quicker than normal.  
  
  
“Okay,” comes out as a breathy sigh, and she watches with hollow eyes as Alex pries the washcloth from her grip.  
  
  
“Sit,” she orders, gesturing to the edge of the bathtub. Sam does as she’s told, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. Alex’s touch is impossibly soft as she takes one of her hands, kneeling in front of her. “I know you’re scared,” she says, “but I promise I'll take care of you.”  
  
  
It’s almost surreal, Sam thinks, how much of a 180° the agent does when she’s not at the DEO, and how incredibly lucky she feels every day to be on the receiving end of  _this_ side of Alex. She lets her eyes slip shut as Alex works, lightly running soap over the creases in her palms and between her fingers. Gradually, her initial panic melts away, becomes less of a noose, making way for contentment as she lets her lover wash the imaginary slickness from her skin all for the sake of humoring her post-Reign delusions.  
  
  
“One of the first things they teach you during training at the DEO is that you can't let yourself get too emotional,” Alex tells her after a few minutes of silence. Ignoring that her other hand is still wet, Sam cards it through her short hair, brushing a couple loose strands away from her face. “Killing is part of the job — _getting_ killed is part of the job, sometimes.” She shakes her head, frowning. “You can’t let yourself think about it for too long. You have to get up, fight, and do it all over again the next day as if nothing happened. You can't _care_."  
  
  
“That sounds… terrible,” Sam says, because it does.  
  
  
Alex nods, before moving to wash her other hand. Then, she pauses her scrubbing, interlacing their soapy fingers together and looking up. “The fact that you’re feeling this guilt, that you care, even for the criminals that Reign killed? That in itself tells me that you are _good_ , Sam. Better than Reign _ever_ was.”  
  
  
The tears prick her eyes before she can stop them, and Sam inhales shakily, looking away. She hasn’t  _felt_ good — she’s felt horrible, like the entire world has closed in on her, like she isn’t deserving of any of the support everyone’s given her in the past few months since Reign’s defeat. But hearing Alex say it makes warmth bloom in her chest, curling around each of her ribs until it sears against her heart.  
  
  
“Come on, let’s rinse,” Alex says then, pulling Sam up and back towards the sink. Sam leans back into her as Alex cups the water and pours it over her hands, the pad of her thumb brushing over her knuckles. As she watches the soap collect at the drain, she melts into the comfort of the agent’s embrace, and for a few moments, all that exists are their coinciding breaths and heartbeats against the sound of running water and fizzing bubbles.  
  
  
"Thank you," she manages to say. "You didn't have to do that."  
  
  
Alex shakes her head. "But I did, and I'll do it again, as many times as you need. Always."  
  
  
  
  
She doesn't remember Alex leading her back to bed, but she remembers the covers being pulled up to her chin, the pillow pressing against her cheek, and the feeling of the mattress below her shifting as Alex climbed in next to her. She remembers the soft whisper of  _it’ll be okay_  followed by the mattress shifting a second time as Ruby crawled into the bed with them.  
  
  
Sleep is pulling at her hard, exhaustion settled heavily in her bones. Out of sheer habit, she still looks for her hands before letting herself be dragged down — looks to see if they're still painted crimson — but they’re buried beneath the blankets, tangled in the sheets. She can’t see them. For now, they’re hidden away where they can’t haunt her, and she lets out a sigh of relief.  
  
  
She’s not better yet, but with both Ruby and Alex curled up against her side, she can almost pretend that she is. The gnawing fear is still there — the not knowing whether or not Reign will make a reappearance, the threat of nightmares still looming over her — and it’s still so terrifying that it paralyzes her sometimes, but she pushes it to the back of her mind.  
  
  
Beside her, Alex mumbles  _I love you_  into her neck, and Sam lets her eyes slip shut as she takes one of her hands and one of Ruby’s under the covers.  
  
  
She holds on with every fiber of her being.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you guys liked it! I live for comments and kudos! :)


End file.
